Thread by @ethuin

Kila kitu na wakati yake… 📚 My book, Conflict Minerals Inc. is out now with Hurst and Oxford University Press. Reviewers say it’s “lucid, compassionate and personal”, and a “devastating and essential reading.” Here is to a few pictures and key points... 🧵

As the subtitle says, the book tells a story of war, profit and white saviourism in eastern #Congo. Through the prism of #ConflictMinerals, it looks at how violence, business and intervention intersect in what was once Eurocentrically called “Africa’s World War.”

In the book, I develop two main arguments: I explain how multiple factors, rather than just natural resources, have driven the wars in #Congo and, hence, I show that the struggle against #ConflictMinerals failed to stop violence but triggered a series of new problems.

Conflict Minerals Inc. addresses policymakers and practitioners as much as academics and the general public. It combines a decade of in-depth anthropological research with critical political and theoretical reflections informed by an “epistemic surrender” to widen our gaze.

Perhaps the most important misunderstanding in post-Cold War peacebuilding, the notion of “conflict minerals” emerged at the verge of the new millennium as UN and NGO reports pinpointed the militarised, illegal trade in coltan during a global price peak.

Yet, conflicts in the Great Lakes of Africa had been escalating since the early 1990s, as I trace in the historical chapters of the book. Extracting and trading minerals was and is just one among a host of options to generate revenue and finance armed conflict.

Recent studies of the Congolese conflicts show that taxation (see @peerschouten’s book) and forms of state capture (see @jasonkstearns’ book) form a broader basis of conflict financing than minerals – now and then. In this 2018 @AfrAfJournal piece, we made a similar point.

However, guided by unrepentant Western advocacy, the #ConflictMinerals paradigm was as efficient as it was misleading and depoliticizing conflict & agency. Linking child soldiers & victims of rape to the ever more ubiquitous cellphone, it forged a powerful Orientalist narrative.

Advocates used a feverishly neo-colonial approach, fronting diehard spin doctors alongside Western celebrities. Meanwhile in Congo, as a group of women rights activists told me once, there was little support to the causes defended by Congolese themselves.

Analytical shortcomings notwithstanding, conflict minerals advocates succeeded in driving laws and policies that engendered a deep restructuring of mineral markets in eastern Congo. Based on hundreds of interviews, my book investigates their impact.

While “conflict-free” sourcing has been hailed as a central solution to end violence in #Congo, recent data suggests a reverse correlation. Violent incidents and the number of armed groups steadily increased since and despite the onset of “conflict-free” mining.

Juxtaposing @IPISResearch’s great research on mining with my work at @GEC_CRG and @KivuSecurity highlights that – as opposed to cruder speculations – there is no observable relation between mining and armed conflict. But let’s go step by step.

The fight against conflict minerals relied, from its onset, on spurious hypotheses (Collier’s “greed theory”) as well as colonial frames that strongly resemble what Teju Cole and others have defined as “white saviourism,” i.e. an experience that validates privilege.

Since colonial times, Congo has been imagined and constructed as a space both empty and savage, allowing for violent extraction as much as justifying intervention with vocabularies as noble as peace, stability and development. The result is a perpetuation of structural violence.

As much as transnational industries reaped the benefits of a brief coltan peak (during the RCD rebellion in eastern #Congo around 2000), new laws and guidelines provided an opportunity for global tin and tantalum lobbies to kickstart a buyer-end monopoly around 2010.

How so? Tweaking OECD due diligence, global industries set up a “closed-pipeline” system to trace and certify “conflict minerals”. Yet, as older (@AJEnglish) and recent investigations (@Global_Witness) demonstrated, the reliability of these systems is depressingly low.

Rather than eliminating violence, corruption and contraband from supply chains, the fight against conflict minerals has resulted in monopoly, imposing prices on Congolese producers who pay the overwhelmingly majority of an inefficient certification to satisfy Western consumers.

All that raises questions on the violent continuities between the colonial past and the present but also on Congo’s place in the world, its entangled histories and connections – very much like Jean Bofane’s Congo Inc. to which the title of my book gives a nod.

For a sneak preview on parts of all this, check out the below @DissentMag essay I wrote a few months ago with Josaphat Musamba. We are currently working on a French version with the wonderful @AfriqueXXI, so stay tuned!

dissentmagazine.org/online_article…

Finally, tweets won’t suffice to thank everyone who helped me on this journey – you are just too many. Aksanti. To all others, don’t forget to (pre-)order the book at bit.ly/3ObqYBR (Europe/UK) or bit.ly/3QEjWXJ (Americas) or contact me if elsewhere.